Customer Reviews

Mind Pool

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Charles Sheffield's The Mind Pool is a rework of an older novel, The Nimrod Hunt. Centered around the hunt for a renegade artificial life-form, the novel paints a mixed picture of the future, with humans living in harmony with alien species, genetic engineering rampant and uncontrolled, a divided, violent, and irrelevant Earth, and a militaristic outer system.

This is a difficult book to get into. Initial chapters are tedious and there are a lot of key characters who inter-develop as the the book continues which devolves quickly into a confusing mess. Sheffield's humour barely holds the story together as empathy with the main, distant and too many, characters seems close to impossible, and the reader is expected to take in a little too much, from different technologies to the behaviors of three wildly different species. The book, initially, also seems to live up to its back-cover synopsis, which in science fiction can be a bad thing, especially if the synopsis seems to be written to appeal to John W Campbell.

The novel is saved by a number of factors: Sheffield's humour, naturally, helps. Certain characters become fleshed out and sympathetic. Some time about half way through the novel the pace and understandability of what is going on becomes quicker and easier. And then there's an absolutely beautiful twist concerning the very subject of the novel - and I say beautiful not just to describe the twist itself but the subject matter and the novel at that point, which just turned my opinion of the book on its head.

This is a flawed novel. You should read it anyway.

..
More accurately, Charles Sheffield's THE NIMROD HUNT, revised as THE MIND POOL, is explicitly an hommage to Alfred Bester's classic THE STARS MY DESTINATION, as Sheffield makes clear in his intro to the revised ed.: "I wanted to emulate the multitude of ideas...the blowzy rococo decadence of [Bester's] future society." Good line, that. And that part is pretty neat, and the best part of the novel. Bester explicitly based STARS on Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (which you can read online for free).

Unfortunately, MINDPOOL never really manages to integrate the good bits into a successful novel -- it's very episodic and disjointed, and deteriorates into pulpy silliness towards the end. I don't know if his first cut at it, NIMROD, was better.

Huh. I guess Sheffield's Matin Link, introduced as a semi-joke in "Marconi, Mattin, Maxwell" (77), was intended as a mechanical jaunte-device all along...

Anyway, I like the idea of successive remakes -- though it's been too long since I read MONTE CRISTO to recall if any of that survived into the Sheffield -- or indeed, if Sheffield knew of this influence on Bester. The endless, cross-generation sfnal internal dialogue, to paraphrase Greg Benford.

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

The Mind Pool tells the story of a future in which humans have encountered only three other intelligent species in the explored universe. The explored universe is essentially an ever exapanding sphere that radiates out as probes continue to move out through space and everything within this sphere is easilt reachable using "Mattin Links."

What I find intiguing about this story is the description of three very different alien species and how they are thrown together with humans, the only "aggressive" species, to form a team. However, I felt that this particular plot point wasn't dealt with in an engrossing manner. The whole novel felt somewhat pieced together and was shorter than it should have been. The catalyst for the story, the Morgan Construct that poses a threat to the universe and the teams are sent to find, felt almost forgotten and I was unclear what role it served in the story except as a launching point.

I enjoyed the story, but there were so many aspects to this universe that I would have liked to learn about and I felt like none of them were really explored in any depth. There was a subplot that was apparently left out of the original version of this story, called The Nimrod Hunt, that I felt was a hinderance to the story rather than adding anything and the author added back in merely because he was fond of it. The ending was somewhat confused and just seemed to stop and I wasn't really satisfied. I think I will pick up another of his books that isn't a rewrite of an earlier story and see how I like it.

This book seemed to be a reprise of Golden age science fiction, in a world where technology is the saviour of all, people are ethical, honest, hard working, updated with a dash of cyberpunk mentality, with hard edges, drugs, lies and the accompanying details.

Unfortunately, the visions did not meld well, leaving the story as a mishmash of ideas, with various sub-plots spawning off in various directions, and seemingly never wrapping up properly. In addition, I don't feel that sufficient detail is given to the elements of the story to make them believable. There are too many glossed over details to draw the reader in properly.

The main plot (at least it seems the main plot) itself represents an interesting idea - the mind pool - but it is lost in the noise.

Nevertheless, it is a somewhat interesting story, and a unique vision. It's just very hard to read.

I've long enjoyed Sheffield. The first I read was My Brother's Keeper. Since then I've enjoyed his imagination and creative stories. This is an incredibly creative book and I have trouble putting it down. I read it first a year and a half ago, and I'm reading it for the second time. Even knowing how the plot twists and turns, I can't wait to finish. He masterfully weaves plots and sub-plots, which take countless twists and turns. He plays on the future-is-seedy theme perhaps a bit too much. Nevertheless, his characters are amazing in their quirks and brilliant streaks. Each character is colorful and intriguing. This is a must read for anyone interested in SF or who is testing the SF waters.

The Mind Pool starts with a dramatic display of power from the "evil" Morgan Constructs and finishes with a twist I could not have predicted. I was never satisfied with the description of exactly what the Morgan Constructs were, but then again, the lack of detail allowed the imagination to take over. The same lack of concrete imagery made the ending a bit hard to visualize, but that ending was so unique that I was too amazed to care.

Enjoyable. However my main comment is that there is a hidden image on the cover.
Find it. :-)

The Mind Pool is a very odd book. For one thing, the story is very obtuse and quite frankly, boring. The two main characters are so similar I found it very difficult to keep track of which was which. And put it all together and it really wasn't that bad. The world in which The Mind Pool is set had enough interesting qualities to overcome the lack of plot. There are enough unique and interesting subplots going on that at times Mind Pool was a real page turner. Clearly Sheffield has some very interesting ideas, but is just not that good at wrapping them up into an actual novel.

Hi-tech, drama and excitement, aliens, superb plot and sub-plot, totally unpredictable... I agree, I like Charles Sheffield (probably) too much but this is definitely one of the best hard-SF books I have ever read !

Not Sheffield's best. It started out well enough, but degenerated towards the end. His character development is weak. Their interaction sometimes seemed shallow and sophomoric, like something I might write. He had some similarities with his Cold As Ice and The Ganymede Club: von Neumanns and, in particular, enhanced psychiatry (by Froppers in this case versus Haldanes in the two later books).
One interesting theme he had is contrasting the human species' penchant for aggressiveness and violence with the lack of those characteristics in the other two sentient races humans encountered in their stellar expansion. I've often wondered what kind of impression we'll make on other races (assuming there are any) when and if we come into contact with them, and after they have had time to try to understand who and what we are. He also had an interesting idea for the expansion of the human race into interstellar space (actually, more of a reconnaissance), and that was a constant launching of probes in all directions that expanded our frontier at about half the speed of light -- something analogous to an expanding bubble.